MARTYN Williams has urged the critics to lay off the young Wales side in the wake of their third successive Six Nations defeat.

The British Lion flanker was handed the so-called "poisoned chalice" of the Wales captaincy as a one-off for the basement battle against the Scots.

It proved yet another miserable day for Wales as they slumped to a 30-22 defeat at Murray-field.

But optimistic Williams is refusing to give up hope on the emerging Welsh talent.

"I said before this game that this squad could be special in the future and this game has not changed a thing," said Williams.

"But that is only if people lay off the team and stop criticising us. There is a lot of talent in this team but they just need time to gel.

"Many of youngsters in this side are still only playing in their first ever Six Nations Championship but when you look at the Scottish side it is just full of experience.

"But if you take out the first 20 minutes of this game, when we gave ourselves a mountain to climb, we were equal throughout.

"We just didn't make the most of all the ball that we had and at times we lacked composure. That meant a lot of passes were knocked on or dropped at important times.

"But there was enough in the game to be optimistic.

"Obviously everyone is very down and even though it was an awesome experience for me to captain my country it was bitterly disappointing to lose another Test match.

"We know we are a better side than results show and now we will just have to dig in and concentrate on getting a result in the next couple of games against Ireland and France."

Williams admitted that in hindsight, he would have opted for goal when Wales received a series of penalties in the second half.

"Obviously, our thinking was that we needed two converted tries to catch up, but things didn't work out that way. It's easy in hindsight now, but we maybe should have kicked a couple of them," he said.

Wales wing Gareth Thomas said it was "backs-against-the-wall" time for the young Welsh side as he looked ahead to the rest of the championship.

He added: "Ireland at home and France in Paris are both huge games and it would be great to bounce back in both of them. You have to give credit to Scotland, they hit us with everything in the opening 20 minutes and it's very difficult to play catch-up rugby.

"When you are 17-3 behind, the instinct is there to play catch-up rugby and take some chances.

"In cases like that composure can often go out of the window, and I think that happened a few times to us. On the positive side, a lot of the boys played very well, particularly Rhys on the other wing, and now we just have to look at the video and analyse where we went wrong."

Thomas's Bridgend clubmate Gareth Williams, who made his first international start yesterday, admitted the players were baffled by some of referee Pablo Deluca's decisions at the lineout.